Review by New York Times Review
THE INEVITABLE QUESTION: Do we need another translation of Virgil's "Aeneid"? Just in the last dozen years we have had versions from Frederick Ahl, Robert Fagles, Barry Powell and Sarah Ruden, all outstanding in their very different ways. One immediate justification is that each translation is the contemporary way of bringing the poem back to the public's attention. New audiences will find the poem newly topical, since the poem is about refugees trying to make a home in a place they had never heard of before their exile; it is about immigrants and nation-building; it is about the Roman idea of citizenship, which saw the citizen body not as an ethnic concept but as a political compact, always potentially open to new groups, in a way that was radically different from the bloodand-soil mystique of Athens. There are all kinds of ways of translating a classical text. David Ferry declares that he has "tried to be as faithful as possible" while allowing for the differences between English and Latin: "It is my hope that this translation... is reasonably close" - even if "reasonably close... is still far away." He appears over all to be aiming for about the same effect as John Dryden said he was seeking in his version, just over 300 years ago: "I have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken if he had been born in England, and in this present age." In many ways Ferry achieves this aim wonderfully. His style is vigorous, intimate and formal too, when it needs to be, without being stiff or pompous. After Dido stabs herself, "her wandering eyes looked up to find / The light of day, and found it, and she groaned"; in the underworld, "a bottomless whirlpool thick with muck / Heaves and seethes and vomits mire into / The river Cocytus." Such lines touch the atmosphere of the Latin, and they stay in the memory. The translation is a free version of the "faithful" and "reasonably close." Moving a good distance from the original Latin is not an issue if the English captures what the Latin captures. When Aeneas' enemy Ttirnus chases a phantom of Aeneas he jeers at it, and a literal translation of his gibes might be: "Where are you fleeing to, Aeneas? Don't abandon your contracted marriage." In his adaptation Ferry hits the derisive tone perfectly, and it's irrelevant that he hasn't preserved the surface of the original: "Aeneas, come back, / You're going to miss your wedding." Often, however, Ferry does not translate lines of the original. I counted dozens of places where one, two, even up to five lines of Latin have been simply omitted. Virgil is not known for verbosity; he doesn't need pruning. Memorable lines, like the one about the "iron door-posts of War" smashed open by Juno in Book 7, vanish for no apparent reason. Regularly, Ferry's translation becomes a kind of paraphrase. At the close of Book 11, for example, 10 lines of Latin have been paraphrased into six lines of English. Sometimes, Ferry does the opposite and adds lines to the original, or else expands using a favored pattern of runs of monosyllables, as when virtus ("manliness" or "courage" or "virtue") becomes "who it is I am and what I have done." This is a form of spare concision that can have its own kind of power, and Ferry - an accomplished poet in his own right, who ran Wellesley's English department for many years and who won the National Book Award in 2012, when he was in his late 80s - is fond of it in his other work too, as in the poem "Ancestral Lines": " ... telling me who / They were and who it was they weren't." But in the "Aeneid," to my ear at least, it strikes an incongruously sub-Hemingwayesque note. Too often, it must be said, it is clear that Ferry has simply not understood the Latin. A lot of the time this is relatively trivial, even if a Latinist like me is bound to be thinking of the dictum of the Latin scholar and poet A. E. Housman, who was made unexpectedly famous by Tom Stoppard's play "The Invention of Love": "Accuracy is a duty and not a virtue." If Ttirnus kills someone with a spear instead of a sword in Book 9 and someone else with a sword instead of a lance in Book 12, it's not the end of the world; nor if Aeneas leaves the "arches" of Latinus' city instead of the "citadels" (arces), nor if he is walking instead of running as he chases after Ttirnus. There are many places, however, where the misunderstanding goes deeper, obscuring what Virgil meant to convey. Ferry has the Latin people being anxious at the prospect that they will have to obey "arrogant masters, these / Aliens lounging around in our native fields," whereas Virgil says "we will be subjected to arrogant masters, we who now sit here lazing in our fields." In the prophetic description of the battle of Actium on Aeneas' shield, Virgil carefully arranges the antagonists (Augustus and Agrippa against Antony and Cleopatra), but Ferry miscues this, giving "on the one side" Augustus, and "on the other side" Agrippa, then "on the other side, too, is depicted Antony." Nor does this edition help the modern Latin-less reader cope with an epic that is, like Milton's "Paradise Lost," a peculiar blend of the emotionally immediate and the densely learned. Ferry provides some heartfelt prefatory remarks on meter and the aims of the translation, but there is no formal introduction about the poem's historical setting or literary tradition, no glossary or list of names. Some kind of assistance along these lines would make reading the epic much easier for modern readers. Like all epics the "Aeneid" is self-consciously encyclopedic, with a barrage of names and epithets that challenge any translator. This translation shows regular misunderstanding of how Greek and Latin names work and what they signify. In the shield of Aeneas Virgil sometimes says that the craftsman-god Vulcan had put in this scene or represented or added that one. Toward the end of the description, Virgil uses an alternative name of Vulcan for variety, saying that "Mulciber" had molded various exotic peoples; in Ferry's version, "Mulciber" has become one of the exotic peoples ("Mulciber / Is shown there and the Nomads ... "). Errors or omissions are present on most pages. Now, there are different kinds of accuracy in translation, and "accuracy" is not even worth talking about in some works that profess a committed relationship to a predecessor in another language. Christopher Logue produced stunning versions of parts of Homer's "Iliad" despite not knowing any Greek. His audacity and freedom annoyed a lot of classics professors, but his "War Music" has stood the test of time, and gives us a wonderful new avenue into Homer. Ezra Pound didn't know Chinese and his Latin was not professional, but his versions of Chinese poetry and of Sextus Propertius are still read because they convey something important about the original and open up new ways of conceiving of this material. Ferry (who has previously translated Horace's "Odes" and Virgil's "Eclogues," among other ancient texts) has not tried to do what Logue or Pound did, but neither is he consistently doing what Dryden did. Dryden expands and compresses as he feels the need, but he is not inaccurate. Someone who knows Virgil in Latin does not stumble when reading Dryden, since it is always clear that Dryden has understood the original and is working his own alchemy upon it. Readers need to know that while they will find a great deal to savor in Ferry's translation, they cannot be confident at any given point that the English they are reading is tracking what Virgil wrote. This is a shame, and a missed opportunity. I am surprised that Ferry's publisher has let the book through in its present form. Someone should have done the necessary checking and correction to allow the crowning work of Ferry's outstanding poetic career to get its due. ? Ferry sometimes opts to prune Virgil's lines, turning his translation into more of a paraphrase.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Virgil (70-19 BCE) died without having polished his epic consolidation of the myth of the Trojan founding of Rome. Some lines are incomplete, and the dense Latin is legendarily a rack for the student's understanding. Though elegant, The Aeneid is also rough, then, and elegance and roughness abound in Ferry's completion of his work with Virgil (he published a version of the Eclogues in 1999, of the Georgics in 2005). If elegance suits the personae of gods, heroes, and monarchs, roughness answers the brutal fighting that bulks larger in The Aeneid than in its primary artistic model, The Iliad. The early books recall The Odyssey, too, when Aeneas recounts his party's journey from Troy to Carthage, while the romance of Aeneas and Carthage's queen, Dido, is a much more substantial episode than Odysseus' engagement with Calypso. The Aeneid is entirely distinctive, of personal and literary rather than popular and oral origins, a cornerstone of not just culture but also of calculated art. Ferry conveys its power even more than its majesty.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
More than the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, The Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil shapes Western literature and cultural identity, our idea of the hero and the nation. National Book Award-winning poet and translator Ferry (emeritus English, Wellesley Univ.; Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations), takes up the Aeneid with engaging results. His previous translations include Horace's Odes and Virgil's Eclogues and -Georgics. -Virgil's stately but vigorous dactylic hexameter is difficult to render in natural English. Ferry prefers iambic pentameter blank verse to achieve the heroic effects. This translation holds its own with the verse renditions of John Dryden, C. Day Lewis, Allen Mandelbaum, and Robert Fagles. Ferry's diction is accurate in tone and pitch, if not always literal. For closer, word-for-word translations, one should consult those of Elaine Fantham, or the prose versions of H. Rushton Fairclough and David West. The chief criticism is the lack of a glossary of names and places, making it challenging at times for those not familiar with the material to keep up with the array of characters. VERDICT An elegant and fluent version highly recommended for serious general readers.-Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
